First post. In a nutshell: I'm a ReadyNAS refugee (Netgear EOL'd the product line) and am going the DIY NAS route. I initially thought TrueNAS was the obvious choice, but I've been very impressed with the flexibility of Unraid and am now about to commit. However, I have some questions regarding setup.

 

Use case: Our household NAS is our storage and media hub. We have dozens of 4K movies and hundreds of FLAC albums dished up via Plex. Our Logitech Media Server and Sonos clients also draw specifically on the music storage. We back up several computers (Windows and macOS) to the NAS via Time Machine, Windows Backup and Arq. We also use the NAS for computer-to-computer transfer as well as to archive less-used documents and large files. With a more powerful machine, it would also be nice to run a local Dropbox-style service, a secure document repository like paperless-ngx and a Windows VM that I can access from my Mac.

 

Based on what I've been able to glean from videos and forum lurking, below is the rough conceptual approach I'm taking to my available hardware. Advice and alternative suggestions are welcome.

 

I have 6x 20TB HDDs. I'd like to set these up as paired ZFS mirrors to give me one large 60TB pool that I'll use for all my data. Unfortunately, I'm a little confused by the difference between "Array" and "Pool" and am not sure how to best configure this. Is there a step-by-step tutorial on how to configure different types of ZFS pools in Unraid? Any limitations or performance optimizations I should be aware of?

 

Down the road, I would also like the flexibility to add another 2x 20+TB HDDs to the mix. From what I can tell, it looks like Unraid handles future expansions exceptionally well, even with ZFS layouts. Is that assumption accurate?

 

And given that Unraid seems to prefer SSD caching over RAM caching, I think it might be best to dedicate one of my 4TB NVMe SSDs as a ZFS cache drive.  Is that assumption accurate too?

 

With my ReadyNAS, I've always run Plex as an OS 'bare metal' app and given it access to two separate top-level shares: "Videos" and "Music". I can then give Logitech Media Server and Sonos discrete user-level access to the "Music" share. I'm not sure if it's possible to split things the same way with Docker apps in Unraid, or if Unraid's Plex can only access a single "Plex" share under which "Videos" and "Music" have to be nested. (Sorry if that's unclear. I can offer more detail if necessary.)

 

I have some less urgent questions on configuring dedicated SSDs for VM storage and automatic power off/on schedules. But what I've mentioned above is the fundamental stuff that will get me up and running.

 

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

To use zfs mirrors you'd need to assign them to a pool, not the array, note that for now at least one array device is required, and old flash drive can be used for that.

 

7 hours ago, pinterpass said:

Down the road, I would also like the flexibility to add another 2x 20+TB HDDs to the mix. From what I can tell, it looks like Unraid handles future expansions exceptionally well, even with ZFS layouts. Is that assumption accurate?

Correct.

 

7 hours ago, pinterpass said:

And given that Unraid seems to prefer SSD caching over RAM caching, I think it might be best to dedicate one of my 4TB NVMe SSDs as a ZFS cache drive.  Is that assumption accurate too?

This will depend on the use case, give as much RAM as possible to the zfs ARC, and if you want to accelerate metadata for the pool you can add a special vdev made of SSDs, it should have the same redundancy as the main pool, note that until 6.13 is out this can only be done manually.

On 1/13/2024 at 10:56 PM, pinterpass said:

With my ReadyNAS, I've always run Plex as an OS 'bare metal' app and given it access to two separate top-level shares: "Videos" and "Music". I can then give Logitech Media Server and Sonos discrete user-level access to the "Music" share. I'm not sure if it's possible to split things the same way with Docker apps in Unraid, or if Unraid's Plex can only access a single "Plex" share under which "Videos" and "Music" have to be nested. (Sorry if that's unclear. I can offer more detail if necessary.)

With docker you can bind mount as many folders as you like into the container, the options in the template are just the suggested setup. Once mounted they are available to add to plex libraries as any other folder would be within the docker containers file system.

On 1/13/2024 at 10:56 PM, pinterpass said:

I'm a little confused by the difference between "Array" and "Pool"

The term Array is a holdover from when unRAID used to be a one pool system, eventually the term will be replaced. The "Array" is the required (currently) disk pool using the proprietary unRAID pooling driver. The unRAID pool provides single or double redundancy, mix and match file systems, easy expansion, and most importantly disks with filesystems that can be mounted independently of the others for disaster recovery. Its the unRAID in unRAID. Currently every system must have one and only one "Array" present for the system to function.